What Quakers do in what we call our hour of "Worship" is very much up to them as individuals.

Some read, some meditate, some pray, some think, some fall asleep....

I don't have a programme. I do my best to simply exist. Much of the time I keep my eyes shut, but I also like to look out the window. The windows in the Meeting Room afford a view of the plants the lodger upstairs has lined up along the wall of her balcony area. Flowers are good. Clouds are good. Birds are good.....

Thoughts show up. Silly ones. Of course they do. I let them come and go, dismissing them with a benediction. Every so often I come to myself and refocus on the silence. I think this is what is referred to as "centering". As I've written elsewhere the silence isn't just about listening or not listening, it involves all the senses. I can sort of see it, I can sort of feel it. It's beautiful and peaceful and wonderful.....

I don't pray. I don't think there's Anyone "out there" to be prayed to. I don't believe in that kind of God. 

The Byzantine ruler on his throne- recieving gifts, receiving flattery, receiving petitions. No, no, no, no, no. That model is so out of date, So very close to being wrong. Except that God is All things and can be an Emperor if we really want. The Emperor is one of the 22 cards of the major arcana- and God is that but also all the rest. He is the Fool, the Hanged Man, the Star, the High Priestess.....

God is everything. God is the flower on the wall, God is the passing cloud and the gull flying under it  God is me, God is you, God is nothing

 Mike and Su and Sej are visiting for the first time this year.  It was Mike's idea to have a cook-out. I don't know if he was thinking 4th of July but he's half American so he may have been. We borrowed the portable barbeque from Damian- and Sandra, Damian's wife, fired it up for us because neither Mike nor I could figure it out.

Damian and Sandra and Aoife were at the party along with Mark (who is fully American) and Dawn and Danny from Quakers. We were a really disparate group but everyone seemed to get along. 

Su is booking a seat at a Spurs home game for a visiting nephew. Seems that the cheapest seat is £100. Football used to be the people's game. 'T'ain't any longer.

 Ailz's work as a trustee of a local care home generates lots and lots of paper- most of which has to then be shredded because it deals with confidential matters. There's so much of it that our shredder regularly over heats.

Shredding paper generates dust.

A-tishoo!

 Damian found a Roman coin while digging foundations somewhere in the Eastbourne area.

We researched it for him.

It's a silver denarius, minted by Octavian to commemorate his naval victory over Mark Antony at Actium in 31 BC. For further details consult Shakespeare W. "Antony and Cleopatra"

On the one side we have a male figure representing Octavian himself, with his foot on the terrestrial globe. In one hand he holds a staff of office and in the other an object I took to be a whip or flail but is apparently the stern post of a war galley. The inscription reads "Ceas. divi. f"-  which translates as "Son of the Divine Caesar". 

And if Caesar is a god what does that make his son? Octavian lets you work that one out for yourself.....



On the other side appears the bust of a winged female who is variously identified as Victoria (Victory) or Pax (Peace).



The coin was struck sometime between 31 and 27 BC- after which Octavian was no longer Octavian but Caesar Augustus, first Emperor of Rome.

We've been using more gas than we've been using- if you see what I mean. The central heating has been turned off for the summer and yet the boiler has been running almost continuously. We indulged ourselves in various theories, then called Sergei in to give us an informed opinion- and, incidentally, service the boiler. He suggested something we hadn't even considered- that there's a leak somewhere on the hot water system. OK, that makes sense- and now I know what I'm looking for I think I know where it is. It's in the area where Damian will be working over the next few weeks- converting the garage and adjoining areas into a bedsit- and if I'm right he'll be able to sort it along with everything else- and I can dial down the anxiety levels. The worst thng in a situation like this is not knowing- and feeling powerless.

I watched a bit of Wimbledon yesterday. It gives me an excuse to be sitting indoors out of the lovely sunshine. There exist pictures of me as a teen with my shirt off- and they shock me rather because it's been many decades now since I've enjoyed being out in really hot weather. I think the horseflies in Switzerland may have cured me of sunbathing. If one of those 'orrible little fuckers bit you you stayed bit.....

 When I was chopping the tall grasses down a week or two back I left a clump of barley standing next to the bird bath. This morning I watched a jackdaw jump up, pull a stalk down onto the path and proceed to peck away at it. Clever bird!

"I dodn't suppose anyone falls out with you," said Mark. "Oh, but they do," I replied,"And especially since I became a Quaker elder." I forebore to mention that he'd come close to falling out with me himself a few weeks before. 

I'm reading Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour. It's not what you expect. There's comedy, but it's no longer heartless- and there's an understanding- that there rarely was in the earlier books- that people, even obnoxious people, are trying their best. When Waugh divests himself of farce he stands revealed as deeply unhappy. It's not exactly autobiographical- Crouchback is very much not Waugh himself- but it follows the trajectory of Waugh's own wartime experience- which wasn't glorious- and gives a lot away. It's a stoic book. I'd even call it brave......

 Picture Diary 96.

1. Forward to the Past



2. CAN



3. Romantic composer



4. Avians



5. Autumn



6. New Ice Age

 According to the media the mysterious bottle that cleared several streets in the heart of Eastbourne was found in a house previously occupied by squatters. The contractors tasked with clearing the property called the police who summoned the bomb squad who sent in a robot to blow it up. 

Was there a mighty explosion?

Apparently not.

 I remember a blind man telling us that what he saw- in his mind's eye- was not darkness- as we'd presumed- but a "wonderful golden light".

A "wonderful golden light " is what I "see" when I close my eyes in the Meeting House.

"Golden" is not quite right. There are other colours there.  You know when you look at a sunset and you can't tell where one colour ends and and the next begins and you call it golden because words fail? Well, its a bit like that- only the colours don't shade into one another but are all present at once. Also it's soft and deep, as gold, the metal, isn't. 

And I don't just see, I also  hear and feel. And all these verbs are approximate. The light is bound up with the silence and has dimensions beyond the senses. It has consciousness, an internal movement as of motes in a sun beam- and is somehow involved with Peace and Love....

 The Summer Solstice- and it's going to be another in this run of very hot days.

Yesterday we drove across the County to buy the intensely local cheese they make in Rudgwick up against the Surrey border. The cheese is called Sussex Charmer and I've been eating it at the Long Man Inn. The outlet in Rudgwick has a cafe alongside where the speciality is toasted cheese and just about everything they serve is finger food. Where are the knives and forks? we wondered. But, of course there aren't any. This fed into the dream I had last night where I was working at a school and my job was to give out cutlery to the children then collect it up at the end of the meal. It was a peach of a job (though it entailed early rising) and I got on wonderfully with the kids.

Rudgwick has a church. I thought it a very average sort of a church. The pictures I took of it were very average too (the sort of uninspired, documentary pictures I've taken in a hundred different places: view of the tower from the south-west, check, close up of tower, check, view looking eastward down the nave, etc.....) so I wasn't particularly upset when I got home and found I'd been snapping away without a memory card.